Strange strategy from a competitor. Is this "Google Friendly"?
-
Hi all,We have a client from a very competitive industry (car insurance) that ranks first for almost every important and relevant keyword related to car insurance.
But they could always be doing a good job.A few days ago i found this: http://logo.force.com/
The competitor website is: http://www.logo.pt/
The competitor name is: Logo
What I found strange is the fact that both websites are the same, except the fact that the first is in a sub-domain and have important links pointing to the original website (www.logo.pt)
So my question is, is this a "google friendly" (and fair) technique? why this competitor has such good results?
Thanks in advance!!
I look forward to hearing from you guys
-
Be very careful about making assumptions regarding competitors.
Just because you see one thing, does not mean either that one thing is helping or hurting a site. SEO is a vast, complex environment. If a site has enough very strong signals across many areas, one or even a few very poorly executed things may not hurt the site. Or it may not hurt the site "until Google catches up with it".
Duplicate content, regardless of method (within a single site, across multiple domains, across a mix of domains and subdomains" is never a true best practice. Ever. it's artificial, and Google most definitely takes the position that if you are attempting to "artificially" (in their view) manipulate rankings in a non-best-practices manner, that's a violation of their guidelines, policies or TOS.
-
Hi Lesley!
Thanks for your response.
The robots.txt file is exactly the same as the "original" website.
I thought the strategy would be to obtain some benefit in being under a strong DA (79).
And i still find strange the fact that is always ranks first for the most important kws for this industry (very competitive one) but maybe it has something to do with the backlinks.
Thanks again!
-
Is there a chance that you could have found their dev site? Look at the source and robots.txt, is it set to noindex and to disallow?
edit: Actually in looking it up, it is something that sales force is doing. I think it would be considered bad, its duplicated content. Another one that is hosted on the same server is
which is also
It looks like salesforce is copying the websites for some reason.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Competitors with duplicate sites for backlinks
Hello all, In the last few months, my company has seen some keywords we historically rank well for fall off the first page, and there are a couple competitors that have appeared that use backlinks from seemingly the same site. For fairness, our site has slow page load speeds that we are working on changing, as well as not being mobile friendly yet. The sites that are ranking are mobile friendly and load fast, but we have heaps of other words still ranking well, and I'm more curious about this methodology. For example, these two pages: http://whiteboards.com.au/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JustinBSLW
http://www.glasswhiteboards.com.au/ In OSE, glasswhiteboards has the majority of links from whiteboards, and the content between the sites is the same. My page has higher domain authority & page authority, but less backlinks. However, if you take away the backlinks from the duplicate site, they are the same. Isn't this type of content supposed to be flagged? My question is about whether this kind of similar site on different domains is a good idea to build links, as all my research shows that it's poor in the long run, but it seems to be working with these guys. Another group of sites that has been killing us uses this same method, with multiple sites that look the same that all link to each other to build up backlinks. These sites do have different content. It seems instead of building different categories within their own site, they have purchased multiple domains that act as their categories. Here's just a few: http://www.lockablenoticeboards.com.au/
http://www.snapperframes.com/
http://www.snapperdisplay.com.au/
http://www.light-box.com.au/
http://www.a-frame-signs.com.au/
http://www.posterhangers.com.au/0 -
How to add ">" category reveal in google search
When i look through google search and see some website categories their site this way. For example groupon www.groupon.com › Coupons › Browse Coupons by Store how do you do this for a website? for example wordpress. does this help with seo?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
How does Google determine if a link is paid or not?
We are currently doing some outreach to bloggers to review our products and provide us with backlinks (preferably followed). The bloggers get to keep the products (usually about $30 worth). According to Google's link schemes, this is a no-no. But my question is, how would Google ever know if the blogger was paid or given freebies for their content? This is the "best" article I could find related to the subject: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2332787/Matt-Cutts-Shares-4-Ways-Google-Evaluates-Paid-Links The article tells us what qualifies as a paid link, but it doesn't tell us how Google identifies if links were paid or not. It also says that "loans" or okay, but "gifts" are not. How would Google know the difference? For all Google knows (maybe everything?), the blogger returned the products to us after reviewing them. Does anyone have any ideas on this? Maybe Google watches over terms like, "this is a sponsored post" or "materials provided by 'x'". Even so, I hope that wouldn't be enough to warrant a penalty.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jampaper0 -
Competitors Building Bad Back Links
Hi there, I recently checked the back links for my site using Open Site Explorer, and I noticed a huge number of bad back links which I believe a competitor might be building to help lower my ranking for a number of highly competitive keywords. Besides spending time disavowing these links, what else can be done? Has anyone else been faced with the same problem? Any help would be appreciated. cXT0lvd.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bamcreative0 -
Passing page rank with frames - Is this within Google Guidelines?
It appears this site is gaming Google for better rankings. I haven't seen a site do it this before way before. Can you tell me what enables this to get such good rankings, and whether what they are doing is legitimate? The site is http://gorillamikes.com/ Earlier this year this site didn't show up in the rankings for terms like "Cincinnati tree removal" and"tree trimming Cincinnati" etc. The last few months they have been ranking #1 or #2 for these terms. The site has a huge disparity in MozRank (8, very low) vs. Page Rank (6, high). The only links to this page come from the BBB. However, when you look at the source code you find 100% of what is displayed on the site comes from a page on another site via a frame. The content is here: http://s87121255.onlinehome.us/hosting/gorillamikes/ When I go to onlinehome.us I'm redirected to http://www.1and1.com/. I'm only speculating, but my guess is onlinehome.us has a high page rank that it is passing to http://gorillamikes.com/, enabling Gorilla Mikes to achieve PR of 6. Does this make sense? In addition, the content is over optimized for the above terms (they use "Cincinnati (Cincinnat, OH)" in the first three H2 tags on the page. And all of the top menu links result in 404 errors. Are the tactics this site is using legitimate? It appears that everything they're doing is designed to improve search results, and not in ways that are helpful to users. What do you think?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | valkyrk0 -
Black Hat? Is it really possible my new client paid someone to SEO the word "here"?
I just took on a client and first thing I saw in Webmaster Tools was the dreaded "Unnatural Link Patterns" message dated Apr 7th, 2012. MajesticSEO is reporting 212 backlinks, OSE is reporting 251. Nothing out of the ordinary, in fact they only anchor text is their brand. However, we then ran an SEO PowerSuite Crawl and found 429 backlinks with 78.1% of links use the anchor text "here" and 77.9% of all links point to the same URL. If this is indeed true I can see why they got the message from Google. The company has admitted they hired a service to do SEO for $299/mo for several months but when they saw no results they quit. Could this company really have gone after "here". It not, I can't find anything that would give them the message they got from Google Webmaster Tools.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Dweber0 -
Why is Google not punishing paid links as it says it will?
I've recently started working with a travel company - and finding the general link building side of the business quite difficult. I had a call from an SEO firm the other day offering their services, and stating that they had worked with a competitor of ours and delivered some very good results. I checked the competitors rankings, PR, link profile, and indeed, the results were quite impressive. However, the link profile pointed to one thing, that was incredibly obvious. They had purchased a large amount of sidebar text links from powerful blogs in the travel sector. Its painfully obvious what has happened, yet they still rank very highly for a lot of key terms. Why don't Google do something about this? They aren't the only company in this sector doing this, but it just seems pointless for white hats trying to do things properly, then those with the dollar in their pockets just buy success in the SERPS. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | neilpage1230 -
Can't figure out how my competitor has so many links
I suspect something possibly black-hat is going on with the amount of inbound links for www.pacificlifestylehomes.com ( http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.pacificlifestylehomes.com ) mainly because they have such a large volume of links (for my industry) with their exact targeted keyword. Can anyone help clear this up for me?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | theChris0